The Book of Joy

“But if you think you are just a normal person—one human being out
of seven billion—you see there’s no reason to be surprised or to feel like
I should be something special. So whenever I’m with queens or kings or
presidents or prime ministers or beggars I always remember that we are
all the same.”
“So when people treat you as His Holiness with such deference,” I
said, “does that make it difficult to maintain your humility?”
“No, I don’t care about formality or protocol. These are artificial.
Really. Bishop, you were born the same human way. There is no special
way that bishops are born. And I think, when the end comes, also you will
die as a normal human being.”
“Yes,” the Archbishop said, “but when people come into your
presence they don’t come as they come into my presence.”
“That I think is because I come from mysterious land, Tibet. Some
people call Tibet Shangri-La, so perhaps a person who spent many years
in Potala is sort of mysterious. And then I think these days you see
Chinese hard-liners always criticize me. So that also makes more
publicity. So these—” The Dalai Lama was laughing at his
mysteriousness and his global fame.
The Archbishop cut him off. “You see—that’s exactly what we mean.
You laugh at what would normally be a source of anguish. And people
say, I hope that when I have some anguish in my life, I can respond in the
way that I saw the Dalai Lama respond to how the Chinese treated him.
How are you able to cultivate it? How did you cultivate it? You were not
born like that.”
“That’s true, it was through training and also the good fortune of
receiving my mother’s love. When I was young, I never saw my mother’s
angry face. She was very, very kind. But my father had a very short
temper. On a few occasions I even got his blessing.” The Dalai Lama
made the gesture of being slapped. “When I was young,” he continued, “I
followed my father’s way, remaining quite short-tempered. But as I got a
little older, then I began to take after my mother’s way. So that way I
lived up to the expectation of both my parents!”
The Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were both insistent that humility